EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WAS 500GB BUT COMPUTER SAYS IT NEEDS FORMATING AS I ALREADY HAVE DATA ON THIS DRIVE WHAT SHOULD I DO NOW

I have been using this External drive for six weeks now but of yesterday my computer now tells me that it needs formatting. As I have data on this disk IE Music and photos I am reluctant to do so. also the drive address changes.

I Have a laptop Connected to an external drive. This is useful Not only for storing large memorydata files like music and photos, but also extends your virtual memory. The problem I had to begin with was the the new hardware and the laptop CPU recognizing the new hard drive. To start with I would plug in and switch on the hard drive and the laptop would recognize and label new drive as drive 'G' for example. However when the laptop is switched off and then on again when the drive is still connected for some reason the new drive is lost.Somehow after noticing this snag and by way of unplugging and replugging the drive all worked well.Oddly enough, and I don't Know if updates may have been involved, but the hard drive is now established as a member of my Laptop family with with printers, camera's mobile phones and stuff all chirping contentedly with one another.And we all lived happily ever after until the next problem came and rained on our parade.

I Have a laptop Connected to an external drive. This is useful Not only for storing large memorydata files like music and photos, but also extends your virtual memory. The problem I had to begin with was the the new hardware and the laptop CPU recognizing the new hard drive. To start with I would plug in and switch on the hard drive and the laptop would recognize and label new drive as drive 'G' for example. However when the laptop is switched off and then on again when the drive is still connected for some reason the new drive is lost.Somehow after noticing this snag and by way of unplugging and replugging the drive all worked well.Oddly enough, and I don't Know if updates may have been involved, but the hard drive is now established as a member of my Laptop family with with printers, camera's mobile phones and stuff all chirping contentedly with one another.And we all lived happily ever after until the next problem came and rained on our parade.

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Just plug it into your computer, go into your desktop and click on My Computer, find the external drive that you plugged in, right click on it and scroll down to format, please keep in mind that all data will be lost once you start formatting drive. Let me know if this solved the problem and good luck..

If it shows up in 'my computer' as a drive letter(like E: drive) but you can't access it,you can recover data from hard drive with data recovery program.Tenorshare data recoveryis a professional data recovery program that can recover data after deeply scanning your hard drive to look for lost data due to drives crash, physical damage,system sabotage, virus attack etc.You can get it here: http://www.any-data-recovery.com/product/datarecoveryprofessional.htm After you recover your data,you can format it to check out whether it can be fixed.

If any of you still have these monitors, and wish to sell them, i am interested in finding some to use as spare parts if i can’t get them working. send email to elah4@zoominternet.net.I have two of these that i have already repaired successfully.Or if you would like to have me repair for you.

there is software to retrieve data from hard drives that have lost the table of contents because of power failure during a wright session, which usually causes this to happen. get the software and learn how to use it before doing anything else to the drive, any formatting or weighting to the drive will cause less chance to retrieve your data from the drive.i have successfully done this on several external drives of my own. and just tor the fun of it i did a reformat and then by the use of software retrieved the data again afterwards, much to my surprise
you will need a extra drive wit space for the retreved data during this process. then you can transfer data back to original drive to use again.

Is this a new external with no data on it? If it is, it may need to be formatted.Go to disk management to see if the drive is there. It may need to be initialize first before you can formatted.If it has not been initialized, a message will pop up for you to initialized it. Once it is done, formatted--This should be done only if don't have any data on it.

Well you should have gone in and marked the sectors that you think are bad, by formatting it odds are you wiped the data off it, you can try a low level recover but I dont think your going to find much. Sorry format means format.